


Familiar Rituals

by nirejseki



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: M/M, brainwashing ptsd, mick has identity issues, personal grooming is a relationship thing, spoilers through 1.10
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-19
Updated: 2016-05-19
Packaged: 2018-06-09 10:26:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6902131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nirejseki/pseuds/nirejseki
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Habits die hard, especially when you've had no time to forget them.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Response to tumblr prompt: Mick and Len cutting each others hair?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Familiar Rituals

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, I had no idea what to do with this prompt. Was it supposed to be fluffy? Kinky? Domestic? Something else? As someone who has curly hair that will not grow past my shoulders no matter what I do and also a minor phobia around hairdressers, I'm probably the wrong person to do this prompt, but whatever.

Both Mick and Len keep their hair short out of convenience. Mick prefers it off entirely, the smooth scrape of a razor along his head; Len’s more inclined towards clipping it short. Len learned the hard way why you don’t want something that can be grabbed and dragged; Mick has enough trouble not burning his eyebrows off on a good day, so walking around with something flammable on top of his head is just asking for another scar. 

Growing up, Mick had always wanted to shave with a straight-edge, but his hands aren’t steady enough – hands that could hold a gun or a match with rock-still steadiness still shake with excitement at inopportune times, and he’s not willing to risk stabbing himself in the head for a smoother shave. 

Len just hated looking at himself in the mirror. 

So when they were together, out of prison, they worked out a deal. Len’s hands stayed steady even if the rest of him was shaking like a leaf and Mick liked looking at Len, so they switched jobs. Once a week – Mick’s hair grows pretty slow and Len usually only needs a quick clip – they take an extra ten, twenty minutes after their early morning shower. Basic maintenance, nothing serious. 

Once a month, last Friday before month end, if they can, they take a little longer than that. Mick’s always loved to see Len handle a knife, loves it when Len perches himself on Mick’s lap and draws the whole thing out, long smooth strokes with the razor, warm towel heated to scorching, fingers digging into his scalp until all the tension’s gone out of it; loves it when it’s his turn, when Len permits him to take _his_ time, lets Mick pet that surprisingly soft fuzz like the touch-shy hissing alley cat that Len is in his soul. Given that contract with Len’s skull the rest of the month usually ends with a punch, Mick knows and values the privilege that it is.

Len keeps his views on the matter quiet, unlike Mick who groans them all aloud, but – well. He wouldn’t keep doing it for over a decade if he _didn’t_ like it. He’s always taken such enjoyment out of doing a thing _right_ , even if it is only the unimportant question of hair.

\------------------------------------------

Kronos sits in his cell for nearly a week as the others continue on their grand mission. 

The others in the crew come to talk with him – not Len – and to try to see what they can do about rehabilitation – not Len – and sometimes just to gawk – _not Len_. He hates them all with a bitterness that rises in his throat and chokes him sometimes. He wants to _hurt_ them. He wants Len to come and see him, face him like equals instead of leaving him to rot. He wants Len to stay away from what he’s become. He wants to get out of this cell. He wants to see if Len’s hand grew back from the ice okay. He wants to freeze it and smash it again and again and again until Len begs him for mercy.

He doesn’t know what he wants. 

He wonders when someone will finally man up and kill him. 

It’s early when Len finally comes to him, very early – the earliest riser of the crew isn’t going to wake up for at least two more hours. Kronos wakes when he hears the familiar tread down the hall, whisper-soft and firm footed. He wonders if Len’s here to break him out. He wonders if Len’s here to kill him. 

Len enters the room, silent, clad in black and – unexpectedly – barefoot. 

Kronos catches a flash of steel out of the corner of his eye from where he is pointedly not looking at Len. So – death, then. Only question is how much talking Len’s going to want to do first: accusations, recriminations, appeals to Len’s memory of the man he used to be…

“It’s Friday,” Len says.

That’s not what Kronos is expecting. He turns to look at Len. 

What he thought was a knife is actually a razor. Just as deadly, of course, especially in Len’s hands, but he’s holding it lightly, not offensively. He’s holding the bag they stored their stuff in. 

“What?” Kronos asks, taken entirely aback. Len can’t possibly be serious. 

“Last Friday of the month,” Len says steadily. His eyes are closed off, even for him; whatever advantage Kronos had had in reading Len’s expressions, he had lost when he’d ripped him open from the inside, heart first, and let them all come spilling out. It’d taken longer than it usually did for Len to regain his cool, but, just as always, he got there eventually, the ice around him thicker than ever. Kronos had always known he’d only get one shot at breaking Len the way Len had broken him.

Len standing there made no sense. What he was asking made no sense.

Len couldn’t possibly be thinking of bringing a straight-edge razor into the same cell as Kronos for a _haircut_.

“Rule doesn’t apply when we’re in prison,” Kronos points out, the “we” slipping out almost unnoticed and immediately regretted.

“We’re not,” Len says. 

“Sure looks like I am,” Kronos replies, gesturing at the walls of the cube with a smirk. 

Len lifts a hand, waves the door open. Kronos – who hadn’t really thought the moron would do it – is too surprised to take advantage of the opening, and Len slips in and it snicks shut behind him. Doesn’t really matter; Len’s inside now – his palmprint available to open doors if Kronos wants to get out.

Why would he want to get out? Everything he wants is right here with him, deadly razor in hand.

“It’s been a week,” Len says, still calm, still cold, still remote. “You leave it any longer, it’ll start itching.”

“You know it’s been longer than a week for me, right?” Kronos asks.

“It’s been less than a month for me,” Len says in return. “In my timeline, we haven’t even missed one.”

Kronos eyes the razor thoughtfully. Is this some twisted sort of reconciliation gesture? He’s never been able to figure out how Len’s brain works sometimes. “What’s to keep me from taking that thing and giving you something to smile about?” he asks. He’s fairly confident he could: even as Mick, he was the better fighter. After the training of the Time Masters, it won’t even be a contest. 

Len shrugs. “Not much,” he agrees, strangely placid. Muted, almost; his emotions so tightly kept in check it’s as if they’re not even there – but Kronos knows better, _Mick_ knows better, knows how the more they’re confined, the more they’re bubbling away under the skin. “You could probably manage it. Only question is – you want a shave first?”

It’s been a long time; he doesn’t know how time moves in the Vanishing Point, if it does at all, or if it was just the machines and rooms that made it seem like forever, but any way you count it, it’s been a long time for him, and he remembers, distantly, how much he used to enjoy it, the sheer physical pleasure of it even if you discount what he used to feel for the man before him. 

The Time Masters aren’t big on pleasure.

“Sure,” Kronos says, leaning back on the bench with a smirk, spreading his legs in crude invitation. Even if Len gets the knife against his head, he’d never be able to kill Mick like that, so he’s got nothing to worry about. Execution isn’t Len’s style. “Go ahead.”

Len moves silently forward, bare feet entirely soundless on the cell floor. He’d deliberately weighted his stride earlier, in the hallway, to give Kronos warning of his approach.

He slides into Kronos’ lap, leg against leg, and pulls open the kit.

Kronos has got to give Len one thing, he doesn’t hold back anything. It’s just as good, _better_ , as he remembered, Len’s fingers digging into all the soft spots on his head, rough and precise with the pressure, those knots at the bottom of his skull that have always stored all his stress; the towel still warm from where Len must’ve heated it, though it cooled a bit during their chitchat, the cool cream, the razor. There’s nothing in Len’s body or hands that comes off like he’s still angry about what was said between them on the ship. 

When Len finishes the shave, Kronos is raring to go for more, his body stirring like it hasn’t in lifetimes or even ever, at least since he was born at the hands of the Time Masters. He doesn’t make a move, doesn’t move his hands up from where they’ve been curled around the edge of the bench to settle at Len’s waist. Doesn’t lean forward for a kiss; doesn’t reach for Len’s head, where Len’s hair is starting to grow out – hasn’t been touched in three weeks, maybe nearing a month, he’d reckon, nothing at all since 2046; doesn’t tumble Len onto the hard ground on the cell.

It’s not his place to do any of that.

That’s _Mick_ , not Kronos. Kronos is a creature of vengeance and bitterness, harsh rage and precise blows both verbal and physical. He has no place in Mick’s bed. 

He can’t be both.

Len rises to his feet slowly; he gives Kronos every opportunity, his shoulders deliberately held loose, all physical defenses down. If Kronos wanted, he could grab the knife now. End it. Have his revenge, at long last.

He doesn’t move, his fingers curling against the bench until his knuckles go white.

Len looks at him steadily for a long moment, then turns away – turns his _back_ – and slips out of the cell and down the hallway, back to his room where no one will notice he was ever gone. 

Kronos can’t place the look in Len’s eyes.

Mick knows it to be despair.


End file.
